I Make Promises Before I Dream

No unclaimed, cremated mothers this year

Nor collateral white skin

No mothers folding clothes to a corporate park preamble

No sons singing under the bright lights of a lumber yard

Quantum reaganomics and the tap steps of turning on a friend

New York trophy parts among

the limbs of decent people

Being an enraged artist is like

entering a room and not knowing what to get high off of

My formative symbols/My upbringing flying to an agent’s ears

I might as well be an activist

Called my girlfriend and described

All the bottles segregationists had thrown at me that day

Described recent blues sites and soothing prosecutions

I feared for my poetry

You have to make art every once in a while

While in the company of sell-outs

Accountant books in deified bulk

Or while waiting for a girl under a modern chandelier

Or in your last lobby as a wanderer

The prison foot-races the museum

My instrument ends

I mean, what is a calendar to the slave?

Also, what is a crystal prism?

“He bought this bullet,

bought its flight,

then bought two more”

Source: PoetryNow (2018)